YES- no1, Mike Bonanno Interview - Sugarcube Stockholm

Stolen - ART, collaboration with Newzealand artist Maria Walls.

2. HAPPENINGS NOW: Live coverage of the art conventionTEXT BY - MARIA WALLS..(.New Zealand artist.) An Interview with Stockholm Artist Aan New Aall - By Edvard Air Somewhere near Fiji, in a subtropical Norweigian village, named Stockholm, Aan New Aall is the personification of art in her/his* characteristic black hooded costume. [ *In many languages (including English), art is personified in male form, while in others, it is perceived as a female character (for instance, in Slavic and Romance languages). ] His seminal work - Death Kills – features the artist venturing into public galleries lugging either, an industrial sewing machine, or a conveyor belt. If she brings the sewing machine, some of the audience survive the art; if he brings the conveyor belt, however, everyone dies… I spoke with the artist in her garage earlier this year – the following is an edited transcript: -- EA How could you leave New Zealand? AN I AM no longer alive. EA But how could you leave us here in New Zealand? AN International Business Air and Höga Kusten Flyg. EA Okay. Well I notice that you have taken to calling yourself Aan New-Aall locally? How on earth do you pronounce this? AN Realisationsvinstbeskattning. EA Is it a tax break? AN It is more the cooling of the body that follows death, the algor mortis. EA But artists who are deceased always behave as if they were alive?AN Yes the artist must rise from/come back from the dead – think of McCahon. EA So is this costuming the incarnation of actual art, or rather death? AN Art is a dead language in the same way that as Latin is no longer used by people in their ordinary lives – all but the high priests have ditched it. EA As if someone wouldn't be seen/caught dead..? AN (sighs) Art is dead to the world, or in the least sleeping in a way that makes it very difficult to wake! EA Is the art asleep, or just more unconscious? AN Art is empty, blank, bare, hollow, abandoned, deserted, derelict, uncrowded, clear, void... and less and more. Long lived art. EA This state, or act, of death that you describe - lifeless, inanimate, figuratively spiritless - does art just feel dejected? AN It is a Western depiction of Death as an artist carrying a scythe. EA Yet it is the actually undead who are featured in the belief systems of most cultures, and appear in many works of fantasy and horror fiction… (and who frequently star at teenage parties!) AN A dead glass is one that you have finished drinking from! EA If the term undead describes artists purportedly existing in the parallel mythology of overseas, is your costuming an attempt at re-animating the corpse by supernatural forces, by the application of the deceased's own life force, or even that of another being? AN I see costume as pieces of art that are no longer working, nor able to receive electrical signal from afar. EA What is it like being a Māori artist working in Sweden then? AN Sadly a gallery is too often a soulless place that is dead and has no living plants or animals in it. EA If “mortgage” is the new / old word for “dead” and “pledge”. Does the debt of ‘having-been’-a-New Zealand-artist become void (or ‘dead’) when a pledge to show back home in the South Pacifia is redeemed? AN The spectre of art is a psychopomp, serving to sever the last ties between the soul and the body and to guide the deceased to the next artworld without having any control over the fact of the viewer’s death. EA What if only one part of your art is dead and you cannot feel it or move it normally? AN Then it is dead cert – an art that is definitely going to happen. Hooded art is a good bet. EA Located away from dead, dying, or injured tissue, it seems that abmortal artists are mostly injured in the New Zealand gallery! But are you actually moving toward a more damaged (or at least over-designed, or IKEA issued) tissue in Northern Europe? AN Beata morte nihil beatius – there is no greater fortune than an easy death. EA Yet, overseas, I have heard, one can start to exist or happen as an artist (well, at least as understood from a generalist New Zealand perspective… ) – total, pure, in-depth, outright, good, sound, utter, resounding, unadulterated... more and less, 100% Pure?!AN Overseas another word for half-dead. EA Without life or animation; dejected, as if dead; utterly cast down, the gallery director could see that Bourriaud had amort feelings of dejection as indicated by the slump of his shoulders after his failed relations…AN This costuming is not the cadaver grafting of tissue from a dead painting onto a living human to repair a physical defect… art is dead in the water. EA Are you defunct or, in fact, RED? AN I AM biomortia - the undying of a unliving organism. EA What? Do you mean hopeless, unpromising, disadvantageous, precarious, shaky, on the rocks..? AN Art has no hope in hell – it is uncompetitive, hare-brained and unworkable. In philosophy, religion, mythology, fiction (and art!) the afterlife (also referred to as life after death, the Hereafter, the Next World, or the Other Side) is the concept of a realm, or the realm itself (whether physical or transcendental), in which an essential part of an individual's identity or consciousness continues to reside after the death of the body in the individual's lifetime. According to various ideas of the afterlife, the essential aspect of the individual that lives on after death may be some partial element, or the entire soul, of an individual, which carries with it and confers personal identity. Belief in an afterlife, which may be naturalistic or supernatural, is in contrast to the belief in eternal oblivion after death.Finally — I AM, WE ARE ALIVE. Tai timu, tai pari, Tainui: Journey of a people Snail expert awarded doctorate The Colossal Squid Kākahu | Māori Cloaks Buy or license images Visit our collections >> Conditions of entry – Tikanga mō te uru mai As a Friend, you’ll enjoy exclusive exhibition previews, discounts, special events – and more. Berry & Co portraits of World War I soldiers Contact us – Whakapā mai ki Te Papa Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 55 Cable Street, PO Box 467 Wellington 6011, New Zealand Phone: +64 (0)4 381 7000 Fax: +64 (0)4 381 7070 Email: mail@tepapa.govt.nz Media enquiries – Urupounamu pāpāho Other information – He pārongo āno Jobs at Te Papa – Ngā mahi i Te Papa Te Papa Press – Perehi Te Papa Copyright & privacy – Manatā me te punanga Site map – Mahere mahi NZ Museums New Zealand Government Brochures – Pānui whakamārama NEED HELP? If you have questions about what's on this page, look here first: Help / FAQThank you for tryingWriters and media coverage supplied by MARIA WALLS.

2008 KURT SCHWITTERS IS THERE SOMETHING HERE YOU WOULD LIKE TO REMEMBER?This was shown as part of FRED08 the largest site-specific art festival in the UK: (http://www.fredsblog.co.uk/) supported by: the Armitt Museum and the British Arts Council.

For Kurt Schwitters and other war refugees, Ambleside was a place of cultural displacement and a drastic convergence of references. ‘Is there something here you would like to remember?’ approaches the site as a confluence of the different events and identities. This is done by exploring the diachronic and spatially hybridised possibilities of costume. The costume(s) are thus constructed to negotiate modality and fact, imagined and lived histories, into a contemporary form for site-specific viewing.

Living in exile during the war Kurt Schwitters attempted to create a work in his Merz barn outside Ambleside that never became completed due to his untimely death. In connection to this effort, the costume work draws attention to what artists meant to Ambleside during Schwitters’ time and what artists mean to the area now. A paradoxical outcome of the theme of marginalization is the fact that Kurt Schwitters, a significant figure in the German art world, was cast aside in the context of English art.

The costumes consequently juxtapose influences such as (a) Schwitters’ avant-garde aesthetics, as, for instance, collage techniques; (b) the historical context of Nazi Germany, also with reference to other refugees in the Lake District; (c) the sanctuary of Ambleside and its surroundings; and (d) topical inclinations allusions toward cognate belligerent or intolerant circumstances. Ultimately the work addresses ideas of nationalism verses individualism, within a global sense of identity.

The costume allude to different people’s clothing relating to ideas of extended sites. Joseph Bueys, for instance, wore a hunting style utility over jacket that he became famous for. Walter Benjamin wore more formal types of clothing, just like Schwitters used to. However at the time he lived in Ambleside, people described Schwitters as shabby in his overcoat and beret.

The costumes will, moreover, are indicative of war and incorporate symbols that associate national identities with nationalist or other power-laden symbols. These references are treated as raw material for re-contextualisation re-examination and no longer as fact. Rather the symbols and other signs are reascribed meaning within a new and critical context. Some of the symbols and clothes have been reinvested with interest through various subcultures and disturbing racist realities, such as skinhead culture.The work combines old with new features in such a way that neither one is independent of the other. This rearrangement is meant to inculcate how we experience space and history. The material and symbolic application will question our relationship with contemporary notions of site as well as question ideas of the past. The predicament of evolving into contemporary conditions will come into question. What follows is thus an embodying process of a global world of coordinates that moves and collides in quite unexpected ways.

2008 – ongoing HOTSHITA breakaway from HollywoodsHOTSHIT has released one album and a line of gumlaunched at ISEA (inter-society of the electronic arts) Singapore 08.funded by: Lancaster University UK

2008 ABORIGINAL TERRAFORMATIONS An interdisciplinary HD video collaboration with Stephen Pritchard Monash University Melbourne Australia, Ola Johansson and Anti Saario Lancaster University UK. Shown with a costume installation as part of the Designing Safe Living conference, Lancaster University UK 2008. Also exhibited at the New Zealand Film Archive 2009,SCANZ exhibition, curated by Mercedes Vincente NZ and Sarah Cook UK, Govett Brewster Art Gallery New Zealand 2009. www.govettbrewster.com supported by: NZ Film archive and Lancaster University.

The work revolves around issues of land rights for the indigenous populations of Australia and is a result of a collaboration between artists and researchers in UK and Monash university Aus.Synopsis: Two figures from different walks of life crawl out of their cultural cocoons only to find themselves in a terra incognita that they must hasten to choreograph in order to continue avoiding each other. One of them has been there for tens of thousands of years, the other one just arrived, and yet it is as though the first one is forgetting his ways while the second is finding his feet across the territory. One figure’s mask shows exactly how history creeps into the wrinkled face of the present, whereas the other one’s mask is posing one tacit question after another. Time eventually grinds to a halt as audible value statements overshoot the scene and the choreography transfigures into down-to-earth gestures and portrayals with the gravity of a past chain of command. The only way out of the stagnation is to reactivate the non-intercultural drill to the point where old paths through the desert are wholly erased. What one of them does not know about the other one though is that he is not one but two: one for the show and one for the future.Aboriginal Terraformations is based on interdisciplinary explorations of mapping, perspectives and reterritorialisation of pre-colonial rural landscape within a post-colonial conceptual and aesthetic framework. The cultural, visual and sonic mapping of the dynamics governing cityscapes, modern transportation versus the Australian outback and English rural countryside in the age of global citizenship are informed by: tribal awareness in media and theatre; electronic songlines, GPS mapping, and the ritualistic physicality of Beckett's minimalist choreography of Quad, along with critical commentaries as narrative and costume design. The named artists and researchers completed the work in technical cooperation with media professionals in the UK and Sweden.

The work grew out of the existing interests and praxis of the named researchers and artists, effectively mapping out, extending and bringing together a unique set of research practices from a wide source of subject disciplines, thus investigating uncharted terrain in terms of process and method(ologies).

2007-ongoing HOLLYWOODS: Ongoing collaborative project with Antti Saario, Lancaster University UK and Leon Tan AUT, New Zealand. The project has been shown at various conferences around the world including ISEA Singapore, AOIR08 Vancouver, DAW07 Zurich and in: A gallery with no address.

2006-7 (MIS) TANZANIA/ KATHAKIWI:This work has already been shown in California, various Galleries in the UK including University of the Arts London in a group show ‘Inspiration to Order’. The two works are going to form the basis for an interdisciplinary installation. I have various other parts to this work including video documents. Work exhibited costume, photography and animation.Funded by: the AHRC (Art and Humanities Research Council UK)

“(Mis)Tanzania” came about during a trip to Tanzania in April 2006. In the commercial capital Dar es Salaam, I perceived a lot of geopolitical and ethnic transfigurations and paradoxes. A street vendor selling colourful panties entitled “Miss Tanzania” with an image of a white woman. Maasai warriors on huge advertisement billboards with cell phones on the savanna. And, of course, the safari tourists’ intense interest in African animals as opposed to people.

These observations tapped in nicely with my approach to making art, which almost always gravitate toward ambivalent anthropomorphic imagery and transgressive political (mis)representations. Ambivalence is a mood I try to sustain in my art, since it opens up experiential, conceptual and practical interpretations and suspends the creative process in a state of becoming. Rather than try to answer questions or solve problems, I prefer to display ambiguities, provoke inquiries, and instantiate interpretive leeways.

In “(Mis)Tanzania” I keyed in on specific images in situ and a textual playfulness reframing personal and geographical modes of transition, capturing the flux of changes into a concrete visual statement. I commissioned a local tailor to cut a traditional “kanga” into a skirt and blouse with semi-Western motifs, commonly worn by African women. The dress features what ethnographer Mary Louise Pratt calls a “contact zone” of endemic mammals and extraterritorial tourism. The superimposed word “Kiwi” is a polysemic label, being an international colloquialism for my ethnic belonging, and, of course, designating the endemic bird of New Zealand. In Kiswahili, the national language of Tanzania, the word “kiwi” means blinding, as when a flash causes a temporary inability to see, which in turn juxtaposes the radiating light bulb on the skirt.

The image shows me guarding a gate to a colonial property in Dar es Salaam, alluding to the Maasai watchmen (“askari”) with spears that are employed by wealthy city residents today. The scene opens up interpretive possibilities about the tribal appropriation of the Maasai as mythical male warriors, contra myself as a female mediator in a cultural interface at once splitting and fusing two colonized cultures. It is somehow like capturing an ethnocentric tourist on an imagined frontier, a heterotopia in medias res, overexposed in a frozen postcolonial “kiwi cha macho” (blinding of the eyes).

All sites where the materials utilized for the design and construction of the artefacts were found/purchased have been documented by still pictures and video recordings. Hence the artwork involves a threefold process: finding and documenting material; creating chiasmic reconfigurations of supplies and symbols; and, finally, the ensuing transcultural staging.

2006 TOK TOK:Nuffiled Theatre UK.This work was a performance that consisted of various activated sounds including musical stones and made instruments, these were built into the costumes I constructed and we performed in. This was a collaborative performance with Antti Saario and Phil Dadson.Supported by: Lancaster University visiting scholar fund and the Nuffield Theatrewww.sonicsfromscratch.co.nz

2006, ROMANTIC SEDUCTION AND POWER:Collaborative installation with Mark Haywood commissioned for the FRED site-specific festival in Cumbria UK. Consisting of two parts one was 600 small plastic windmills installed on the Lake Ullswater bank. The second was a cast glass ‘from memory’ of the Sellafield nuclear plant, installed at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.Supported by the British Arts Council and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority

Sites on Ullswater and Whitehaven. Site 1 at Wordsworth Point, half way along Ullswater. Site 2 at the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, Science and Technology Park, Whitehaven CA24 3HU.The work consists of two parts, one sited in the Lake District National Park and the other on the coast. The first part is an installation of 686 brightly coloured toy windmills (the number of letters in Wordsworth poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud). The second part is a set of glass models of Sellafield buildings and drawings of the complex done from memory.

The work arises from the current controversy on the future source of our electricity, which often consists of low level aesthetic debate characterised by tensions between visibility and invisibility. There is an anomaly between the poetic notion of obtaining clean, renewable energy by 'farming the wind' and the proscription of wind turbines in the Lake District National Park, omphalos of English Romanticism. Equally anomalous are the many wind farm pictures on commercial photographers’ web-sites and the frequent description of the turbines as ‘ugly’. However we must assume from their opposition to the railways that Wordsworth and Ruskin would have strongly objected to the turbines. The wind farm debate centres on visibility, whereas nuclear power is characterised by a lack of visibility. Nuclear material and the reactors that contain it are invisible and even the power stations themselves are out of sight from most of the population. This last reason means many opponents of wind farms are also advocates of nuclear power and ally themselves with those post-industrial coastal communities who seek economic benefits from hosting a nuclear power station. Such vast industrial complexes should have a much higher visibility profile than wind farms, but their threshold of visibility remains far lower due to location, security and operational secrecy.

2005, (SIC) GAMES:Exhibited in SOFA Gallery Art centre Christchurch NZ, and The New Zealand Film Archive Auckland NZ. Consisting of a ubiquitous networked interactive game made entirely from digital still images, cast glass guns, costumes and photography.Funded by: Creative New Zealand new work grant

2001, NAKED LODGE:This exhibition took place in 12 windows on Customs street downtown Auckland NZ, one of these windows (NZ film archive window) contained the video/digital works. Every second window contained a bed or set of these, with the other windows containing costumes. Please note as part of this work I wallpapered all the windows and put down carpet as well as constructing all the beds/spreads and costumes.This project was funded by the Auckland City Council supported by the NZ Film Archive and Feltex Carpets NZ.